SEARCH FOR A SILVER LINING
EVELYN LAU THANKFUL AS HER LATEST POETRY BOOK APPEARS
Writer Evelyn Lau says she has felt bad about feeling good.
“You want an embarrassing confession?” the former Vancouver poet laureate said. “Because my freelance work dried up, I qualified for (Canada Emergency Response Benefit) and having the CERB, well that is more money than I am used to making. I have to confess, for a few weeks after qualifying for it, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t anxious. I felt so guilty everybody was feeling that high-pitched anxiety for the first time, but as a freelancer and writer who has never had a stable job, I’ve always had that chronic anxiety from month to month about how am I going to survive.
“Just knowing for four months I have this $2,000 ... I was just walking around grinning on the street while everyone was walking around under a black cloud. It’s so pathetic, but I am finally out of that phase and back to chronic anxiety again. Oh my God, I was feeling incredibly patriotic and grateful for living in Canada where we have these support systems.”
Another, less complicated, reason for Lau, 48, to be happy is that Anvil Press recently released her eighth book of poetry. Pineapple Express is a collection that leans into topics like moods, anxiety, obsessiveness, the unobserved reality of the aging woman and mortality. Things, she says, “we are all talking about now almost inescapably.”
Pineapple Express is Lau’s 13th book. She was first published at the age of 13. Then in her late teens Lau became a bestselling author when entries from the journal she kept while living on the streets of Vancouver and surviving in a world of prostitution and drug addiction were turned into the 1989 memoir Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid.
Over the past three decades, Lau’s work has appeared in a wide range of publications, from literary magazines to daily newspapers.
Runaway, made into The Diary of Evelyn Lau (a 1994 TV movie starring Sandra Oh in the title role), remains a source of pride for Lau.
“I think I have learned to be grateful to have had at least at one point in my life that sort of wider attention for my work. Because in all these years that I have been toiling in poetry,” said Lau
“I’ll sit, say on the Governor General’s jury, and be reading a book by somebody in the Maritimes and look at the back cover and realize he has published eight collections of poetry and I have never heard of him, nor has anyone else. You realize people labour at this for so long and they don’t get any glimmer of recognition, and so to have had that once. …
“Obviously, it is gratifying to reach people and to have people come up to you and tell you your work has been meaningful to them or has shaped some aspect of their lives,” added Lau. “But certainly I don’t miss the kind of gratuitous attention that also comes with that.”
While Runaway’s success brought with it book sales and a bit of fame, Lau laughs and says poetry by its nature protects one from the spotlight.
“Poets essentially end up speaking to other poets, which is something we essentially complain about but at the same time those are our truest readers; the people who are willing to pay attention to the words and give the sort of attention poetry demands,” said Lau, who’s served as writer-in-residence at the University of B.C., Kwantlen University and Vancouver Community College. “I think there are very few casual readers of poetry.”
Lau said that at parties, she’s noticed people love the novelists but tend to not know what to do with the poet in their midst.
“If you say you are a poet, there’s usually dead silence,”
Lau said with a hearty laugh. “People will say they love to read and they read everything except poetry, and then they kind of step back.”
She gets it — poetry isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but that said, she has been part of the successful and long-running Poetry in Transit program.
“I think bringing poetry into public spaces is important. It helps to remove that sort of intimidation factor,” said Lau.
Lau is working on another collection and says having
Pineapple Express come out has been really helpful in her “process of letting go.”
Lau’s other work as a freelance editor and consultant has slowed due to COVID-19. Her teaching job in Simon Fraser University’s continuing education program has also been affected. Until a couple of months ago she was teaching poetry series for the weekend student with fellow poet Fiona Tinwei Lam.
“Many of the people that sign up are retired, so part of the impetus is getting out of the house, forming new social bonds. That was all disrupted,” said Lau. “Who knows how that will affect things going forward?”
One thing she does know, though, is that SFU is moving its continuing studies programs to online for the fall.
Lau said she would likely do her work person-to-person over the phone as she has an “eccentric relationship with technology.”
“I am just an overly stubborn person. So I don’t have Wi-Fi at home and never have. Never had a cellphone,” said Lau. “This has all been in an effort to basically keep my workspace, which is my little apartment free of distraction.”
So if you want to get in touch with the winner of the Milton Acorn Award, the Pat Lowther Award, a National Magazine Award winner and a Governor General’s Award nominee, it’s best to step away from the keyboard and actually pick up the phone and connect with Lau.
“In the past I mostly worked out of the library,” said Lau of using public computers. “Right now I have my partner’s laptop which I borrowed off of him and I splay myself on the floor in the lobby downstairs to try to pick up a Wi-Fi signal and try to do my communications that way. It all seems like a convoluted way to do things, but it is really about trying to maintain that separation between work work and the other work — the personal work.”
While she is writing at the moment, Lau says like the rest of us that remaining focused can be an issue as our lives seem to be blanketed in a general malaise.
“What makes me pull my hair out is having time doesn’t necessarily correlate into being productive. But of course that is probably true in every discipline,” said Lau. “Like everyone else, I have been fighting that sense that ugghh! I just want to melt into the sofa.”